RE: OT request for arcane tech help

Keith,

My wife's e-mail has recently been subject to a similar attack. I'm no
expert on these things and her domain host wasn't interested, but I've been
doing a bit of reading on the web and it seems likely that the e-mail
attached to her domain has been "harvested" from the internet, a discussion
forum or somesuch. It seems that anyone sending an e-mail can put anything
they like in the "From" field, and the reason that spammers use fake
addresses is that large volumes of mail will be flagged by their ISPs.

It is said that spammers usually move on to a different address after a week
or two, but it may be possible to deflect the bounce messages by disabling
the catchall feature of your e-mail account. To do this for my wife's
account, I had to go to her domain's control panel, click on "Default Mail
Account", then "Set Default Address (Catch All)", and type ":fail:" in the
box which asks where unrouted mail to the account should be sent. Any
bounce messages addressed to qytwehx@herdomain.com (or other name made from
random characters) should then go back to the original sender who,
hopefully, will then move on to someone else's e-mail address.

I've only done this tonight, so can't say if it's worked yet, and of course
your control panel will probably be different.

And a disadvantage, I suppose, is that you cannot use the catchall feature,
but hope this is some help.

Liam

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